[LONG] The fonts SIG irregular status report

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 11:11 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 
> Le Mar 18 novembre 2008 09:32, Ralf Corsepius a écrit :
> >
> > On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 03:08 -0500, Jens Petersen wrote:
> >> > As I wrote before, I don't think we could win a lot by automating.
> >>
> >> Well I tend to agree now: a good set of templates and rpm macros
> >> seems the right way to go.
> > No, rpm macros are the road to ruin a distro.
> >
> > Once they are used in a distro, they impose major portability issues
> > and are close to impossible to get rid.
> 
> Unfortunately, deploying fonts requires scriptlets to manage
> thefontconfig cache, font packages are often huge and need splitting,
> and sriplets + subpackages = boom without a minimal automation.
> 
> Please review
> http://nim.fedorapeople.org/rpm-fonts/rpm-fonts-1.8-1.fc11.src.rpm
> and the other files in this directory, and propose ameliorations
> before we make it the backbone of our Fedora 11 font packages.
I will vote against this proposal and this package.

Rationale: 
All these macros do is causing further pollution of the rpm macros,
break many details (try rpmbuild --define '_datadir /opt/foo' and add
further cross distro-portability issues (Consider RHEL3 or rpm's from
other distros).

May be you recall the issues with Mandrake / Mandriva macros and with
SuSE-macros, now you seem to be wanting to conduct Fedora into the same
direction. 


Ralf